Game Changer.

Do you resonate with this sign? Maybe you can’t wait to e-mail the picture to your team to energize your commitment to forwarding continual performance improvement. Before you hit “send,” pause to soberly consider the full implications of such a radical message. In most companies, the hard-to-admit reality would be best captured in a dramatically different sign: Now be ruthlessly honest. Do you work for a competent-is-good-enough organization? So if you raise the bar to proclaim never-ending performance improvement as a job requirement, your life is about to get very messy. Do you really want to get bogged down dealing with uncomfortable emotions–fear of failure and self-doubt–that inevitably arise when people feel forced to expend the unreasonable effort and risk required to keep getting better. After all, they didn’t sign up to become Navy Seals! So how does Deschutes Brewery live their core value “Do our best and next time… read more →

Would you have the courage to post this sign on your desk? If not, what’s holding you back? When I ask CEOs and Sales Vice Presidents this question, I hear these justifications: “There’s hardly sufficient time to get our real work done. Taking our sales reps off the streets to a classroom for training is a luxury we can’t afford. And our senior management team should already be quite proficient in their leadership skills.” “If we set the bar that high, at least one-third of our team would be thinking, ‘This isn’t what I signed up for.’” Sound familiar? Business leaders accept these pervasive dilemmas and operate with the precarious hope of freeing up time for improving capabilities. Deschutes Brewery’s sales organization doesn’t rely on hope. Instead they’ve solved both of these pervasive dilemmas in pursuit of a game-changer advantage. In this two-part blog, I share highlights from 3-year case… read more →

How far does an elite leader go in taking accountability for the choices, actions, and results of team members? Be ruthlessly honest in answering these three questions: If you’re leading a meeting, are you accountable for all team members being fully engaged from start to finish? If you’ve shared expectations, gotten buy-in on results, done proper training, created incentives, cultivated an accountability-driven culture, are you accountable when your team members repeatedly don’t do what they know they need to do? If your boss micromanages people, are you accountable for pointing out how his/her actions overlap with your job responsibilities or impede the quality of your work? For an elite leader, the answer to all these questions is “Yes. I am accountable.” And if you’re a leader seeking to improve, you are massively empowered whenever you choose to take accountability. Accountability is source of extraordinary freedom. You gain access to your… read more →

How do you generate confidence to embrace big challenges when you have no tangible evidence to base it on? You may be enduring a string of disappointing performances. You could be facing unfavorable circumstances. Failure seems inevitable. In this two-part blog, I offer two pivotal guidelines. First, stop looking for confidence in conventional places, namely external factors like recent success and favorable circumstances. (Click here to see part 1 of this blog) Instead, draw upon an inner source of confidence—your own ability to generate empowering beliefs, proper energy, focused concentration, and high skill proficiency while performing. I will describe a set of skills from the mental training program of the U.S. Olympic Team which are transferable to business leaders. I call them “power optimization skills.” These skills will enable you to exude self-confidence and gain access to your full performance capacity. I’ve practiced these skills for over a decade on… read more →

Have you ever sensed you’re destined to fail at an important goal, and saw no way to muster up even a shred of self-confidence? If so, you’ll empathize with my predicament this summer. Two weeks before the pentathlon at the USA Track & Field Masters Championship, three of my events–the long jump, javelin, and 1500 meter run–are seriously unraveling. All signs point to a crash and burn failure in store for me. After a year of intense 20+ hour weeks of training, I’m heading into a competition with zero confidence. I called my wife, Haley, for coaching on what to do next. Our conversation produced the most profound lessons learned from failure in my entire life. If you’re like me, you look for confidence in all the wrong places—your recent successes and current circumstances. Where else would you look to gain confidence? How can you possibly exude confidence when all… read more →

Based on conventional thinking about performance, there’s no way I should be a world class pentathlete. And yet…on July 23, 2015, I won the bronze medal in pentathlon (long jump, javelin, discus, 200 meter dash, 1500 meter run) at the USA Track & Field Masters Championship. Eight months later when I checked the pentathlon point totals for 2015 I was pleasantly surprised to see my score earned the #8 world ranking in my age group. The most valuable part of my achievement was the destiny-shaping mindset disturbance that resulted. I discovered the upper limits of performance are NOT determined by the conventional notion of talent + experience + hard work. It takes “grit.” Grit researcher, Dr. Angela Duckworth, says grit is the tendency to sustain interest in and effort toward long term goals. Bottom line – grit involves a blend of passion plus perseverance. In this blog, I will share… read more →

As a masters track sprinter and pentathlete, imagine my joy as I walk onto the track at UCLA’s Drake Stadium and observe the revered Coach John Smith working with Olympic Medalists, Tyson Gay and Carmelita Jeter. Across the track doing warm up drills is another world champion, Allison Felix. Be still my heart! I quickly took notes on the workout and the coaching style. I expected to see Coach Smith teaching unique and advanced sprinting techniques. I was wrong. During a break in training, I said to Coach Smith, “In coaching these world-class sprinters, I notice you focus on mastering the basics.” The questioning tone in my voice implied, “Am I missing something?” Smith retorted, “The athletes who don’t focus on fundamentals never become world-class.” I instantly noticed the sharp contrast between Smith’s mindset and the mindset of business leaders who assume their staff possess the fundamental skills for their… read more →

You have no idea how much victim mentality shows up during your conversations at work. Not even close. I just finished a month of coaching sessions with 35 high level executives and here are examples of the vintage victim language I heard: “After several years of success, people naturally grow complacent.” “Most people around here think we already have too many protocols to follow.” “My team has plenty of experienced employees nearing retirement, and they don’t want to change.” “That’s a great idea, but there’s uncertainty in the marketplace and in government policies. The timing isn’t right.” No doubt you’ve heard similar remarks every work day. On occasion, you’ve been the one uttering them. But did you distinguish these phrases as victim language or did they pass as inescapable obstacles that curtail any chance to improve performance? Each of these phrases captures the prototypical victim stance: “I’d change how I’m… read more →

How do we develop leaders who are A-players when there’s barely enough time to get the day’s work done? This question poses a dilemma business leaders view as an insurmountable problem inherent to being in business. Solve that dilemma, and you change the game. A game-changing opportunity requires looking in a different direction than your competition. One place to look for solutions is in a disparate field such as sports, where a coach’s top priority is developing an elite performing team. I’ve been privileged to learn leadership development lessons from Super Bowl winning Head Coach Pete Carroll of the Seattle Seahawks. When Carroll coached the USC Trojans in 2006-2009, I immersed myself in coaching clinics and watching team practices. Over the next five years, I’ve adapted the best principles from his player development process to help my clients build all-star leadership teams. I’ve field-tested my adaptation, called the Learning-While-Working Process,… read more →

In 2014, how much of your time and effort resulted in meaningful achievement, and how much got derailed by distractions -moment by moment, day by day? Did you accomplish vital goals or fall short despite your best attempts to employ time management tactics? Are you frustrated when you realize well-known time management practices seem to be ineffective in a fast-changing, non-stop workplace? To help you produce a breakthrough in goal attainment in 2015, I want to share five uncommon practices of elite performers who master the challenge of getting short-term deliverables done while preparing their teams for sustainable success. FIVE UNCOMMON TIME MANAGEMENT PRACTICES Practice 1: Take accountability for your undermining behaviors. Competent performers know what they need to do to improve time management, but don’t reliably execute their plans. Elite performers take accountability for making choices that undermine the execution of their plans, and they make course corrections. Be… read more →

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Invitation to Test Art’s Expertise...I realize you want to make a thoroughly informed choice in searching for an excellent leadership speaker for your meeting. If you and your program committee outline the challenges your organization faces in developing A-player leaders, I'll apply my recommended best practice to these issues, in real time, over the phone. Pulverize me with questions until I offer original insight into your problems you didn’t have when you called. You can then decide if you’d like to talk about your speaker needs. Call Art: 425-814-3038